"The Fact No Sabotage Has Happened Is Proof It Will"
October 10, 2016 8:57 AM   Subscribe

Pictures of Japanese-Americans, 120,000 of whom lost property and were placed in camps for the duration of the war. "The people who lived across from us came to our house and took everything." - George Takei

The LA Times: "A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched... So, a Japanese American born of Japanese parents..notwithstanding his nominal brand of accidental citizenship almost inevitably and with the rarest exceptions grows up to be a Japanese, and not an American."

The policy was applied to those found to have even just 1/8 Japanese ancestry.
posted by blankdawn (45 comments total) 49 users marked this as a favorite
 
"The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken."

That's some sound proof logic right there.
posted by A Bad Catholic at 9:03 AM on October 10, 2016 [20 favorites]


In LA, there's the national Japanese-American museum, which has a large section on the internment camps. The docent who showed me around (and maybe all the docents?) was forced with his family into one such camp when he was a child. It was something to hear him talk about it. I worry what will happen as the relocation passes from living memory.
posted by dismas at 9:09 AM on October 10, 2016 [6 favorites]


It is missing photos of where they were evacuated to... internment. (More at LoC)
posted by TwelveTwo at 9:11 AM on October 10, 2016 [7 favorites]


I worry what will happen as the relocation passes from living memory.

the best way to do this is to support that museum. donate to it and others like it, make sure it's there for future generations.
posted by poffin boffin at 9:21 AM on October 10, 2016 [5 favorites]


As mentioned at the end of TwelveTwo's first link, Manzanar still exists as a national historic site that you can visit. It's really remote but if you ever get a chance I highly recommend going there.
posted by introp at 9:21 AM on October 10, 2016 [10 favorites]


Between the ages of 5 and 8, I went to an amazing school in Ann Arbor. One of the things that they had was called a Mini-Course, where once a week for four weeks, you spent an afternoon learning about a particular topic, and you could choose ANYTHING from the mini-courses being offered (I remember taking one about Native Americans in Michigan, for example, and one that was about writing poetry).

One of the teachers was an older British woman who had grown up in London in the 1940s. She, and a friend who was a Holocaust survivor, and our music teacher, whose father was interned at Manzanar, taught a mini course about the lives of children during World War Two. We read Twenty and Ten, and we read The Invisible Thread. Yoshiko Uchida's autobiography of her family's internment in the United States scared me just as much as the Nazis searching for Jewish children in a French convent. It's yet another piece of American history that we haven't come to terms with, haven't truly acknowledged, and haven't truly atoned for.
posted by ChuraChura at 9:23 AM on October 10, 2016 [29 favorites]


Takei spoke at Butler University last year on his experiences with internment and connected the marginalization of people to the struggle for marriage equality.

Sorry the local fishwrap's web site is such a mess.
posted by Gelatin at 9:44 AM on October 10, 2016 [2 favorites]


Open question, what percent of Americans today would support something similar for Muslim Americans in the wake of another large-scale 9/11 type act of terrorism?

Maybe not physical relocation (too 20th century), but something like universal probation with electronic surveillance, ankle bracelets, etc?
posted by blankdawn at 9:49 AM on October 10, 2016 [2 favorites]


This is more relevant now than ever, when certain US political figures are calling for the immediate deportation of all undocumented immigrants and Muslims as well, citizen or not. Regardless of whether they win anything in the upcoming election, their prominence indicates a groundswell of the same really ugly ideology that led to the internment camps.
posted by indubitable at 9:54 AM on October 10, 2016 [7 favorites]


If it's OK, I want to point out a previous thread I posted on the internment of the Aleutian Islanders, which I'd never read or heard about at all! The article from Maison Neuve, "The Forgotten Internment," is pretty shattering.
posted by ChuraChura at 10:14 AM on October 10, 2016 [8 favorites]


Not only can it happen here, it has happened here...repeatedly.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 10:20 AM on October 10, 2016 [5 favorites]


My cynical take is we don't need to worry about forgetting this happened, because it's always with us.

It's 2016: Woman On Upper East Side Yells, 'Go Back To China' At (American) NY Times Editor
posted by danny the boy at 10:35 AM on October 10, 2016 [2 favorites]


There's also a small, semi-permanent exhibit on the camps at the California Museum in Sacramento. It's been a while since I've been there, but I recall it being a very good and sobering exhibit.
posted by foonly at 10:35 AM on October 10, 2016


Open question, what percent of Americans today would support something similar for Muslim Americans in the wake of another large-scale 9/11 type act of terrorism?

the research has already been done, we're just calling them "trump voters" now
posted by poffin boffin at 10:36 AM on October 10, 2016 [24 favorites]


I was recently watching an old Batman serial from the 1940's, and my jaw dropped when the action shifted to the Japanese section of town, and the narrator said it was deserted because the government had "wisely removed" all the Japanese-Americans. You always *want* to think that horrors like this weren't widely known about, but nope.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:37 AM on October 10, 2016 [14 favorites]


It is missing photos of where they were evacuated to... internment. (More at LoC)

The last picture from in that gallery of Ansel Adams photos really affected me. It's this one. Pool in pleasure park, Manzanar Relocation Center, Calif.: Japanese-style garden with pool at dusk with mountains in the background and moon.

Gardens, carved out of the desert.
They were created by the Japanese-Americans who were confined at Manzanar War Relocation Center in the 1940s. It’s estimated that there were, at one point, more than 100 gardens inside the fences and underneath the guard towers at this 814-acre site in eastern California’s Owens Valley. The men and women held there built the gardens between the rows of barracks, outside the mess halls, and along the firebreaks, as a way to improve living conditions and add beauty and hope to the desolate prison landscape.
The Manzanar National Historic Site recently won an award for excavating and stabilizing one of the gardens and a fish pond.
Japanese Americans created gardens to improve their prison-like surroundings, using whatever materials they could find. Like other gardens at Manzanar, the Block 12 mess hall garden illustrates many traditional characteristics of Japanese gardens, with features representing a mountain, a stream, waterfalls and cascades, and crane and tortoise rocks. The Arai pond featured a stream, rock borders, three islands, a fish tunnel, and even water lilies. It was a “place of beauty and serenity,” according to Madelon Arai Yamamoto, the daughter of the pond’s creator.
There's been more than 20 years of archaeological investigation at Manzanar, and more recent work at some of the smaller sites such as Kooskia. (There were a host of different sites - Manzanar was just one of ten War Relocation Centers.)
posted by zamboni at 10:50 AM on October 10, 2016 [3 favorites]


If Earth were conquered by extraterrestrials, I wouldn't even be mad.
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:37 AM on October 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


After all this time, I can feel his shame and embarrassment. WTF, Humanity? Why do we have to keep doing this again and again?
posted by droplet at 11:38 AM on October 10, 2016


Farewell to Manzanar is an evocative and beautifully written memoir of childhood years spent in that camp.
posted by jamjam at 11:43 AM on October 10, 2016


My grandparents came from Kansas to California, and my grandma used to tell a story about a Japanese store owner who was taken away because there was a stash of weapons in their basement... when I asked her if she or anyone she knew had actually seen any weapons, or even photos, she said, "Well, no..." and it was obvious that she had never questioned the reports at all.

We talked about what what's known now about that whole travesty, and I like to think I convinced her to doubt to some degree, but that stuff was just so pervasive, there was pretty much no one questioning it at the time. (Well, except Japanese-Americans, of course.)
posted by Huck500 at 11:44 AM on October 10, 2016 [4 favorites]


here is Ansel Adams' Born Free and Equal, a collection of photos from Manzanar

Looks like TwelveTwo beat me to it though
posted by meows at 11:46 AM on October 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


Currently in San Francisco:

"Japantown leaders proposed a gift to the neighborhood: a simple Zen rock garden at the foot of Cottage Row to honor the first generation of Japanese-Americans, the Issei, who established the community here after the 1906 earthquake and fire"

Cottage row consists of a few houses that escaped the demolition of the original San Francisco Japan town.

Of course the neighbors who currently live in the very few houses that were not demolished after being stolen from the interned Japanese had something to say:

"By a second hearing on August 11, Lambert arrived with a group of neighbors ready to declare his opposition to a Japanese garden on the Sutter Street side of the Cottage Row Mini Park, which he has denounced as “an out-and-out cultural land grab.”"
posted by Dr. Curare at 11:48 AM on October 10, 2016 [13 favorites]


“an out-and-out cultural land grab.”

Irony truly is dead.
posted by tobascodagama at 12:15 PM on October 10, 2016 [7 favorites]


"By Executive Order 9066, over 7,000 Japanese, most being American citizens, were forcibly imprisoned at the Granada Relocation Center in Granada, Colorado from 1942-45 ... Granada Relocation Center’s unofficial name became “Amache,” named after a Cheyenne Indian chief’s daughter..."
posted by jazon at 12:15 PM on October 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


My MIL and FIL were in the camps when they were small. I grew up and spent my young adulthood with my wife's family, many of them were in the camps. Our living room is filled with family photos with tarpaper shacks in the background.

It's an honor to have a few of these folks in my life still.
posted by humboldt32 at 12:40 PM on October 10, 2016 [12 favorites]


I was really interested in the topic of Japanese internment as a child; so much that I remember writing essays and research papers on the topic when allowed to pick my own topics in my history classes.

As a Hispanic girl from Southwest Florida, the very concept of this was equal parts horrifying and absolutely foreign to me. I also think the topic captured me as a kid because my teachers weren't really teaching about it. We got lectured on the Civil War, and the Space Race, and there were Mexican and Haitian and other Caribbean cultural things, but in my classes, we largely didn't talk about other Events That Occurred in Other Parts of America, Especially Those Featuring Minorities That Don't Have a Large Presence Here.

So, when I first learned about it, I felt horrible that didn't know about this terrible thing that had happened to our own citizens! I deeply sympathized with all the books I'd read about it, as there are some remarkable books on the topic. Uchida, mentioned upthread, was one of my favorite YA/Children's authors on the subject. (Unfortunately, she's also one of the only YA/Children's authors on the subject, and definitely the most prolific one.)

This definitely lead to my broader interest in Japanese culture in general as a teenager. As an adult now, though, I worry that we're going to try to repeat our mistakes again, and that scares me so thoroughly.
posted by PearlRose at 12:47 PM on October 10, 2016 [2 favorites]


"The people who lived across from us came to our house and took everything."
Which is why I say that White Americans have been among the most the most successful racists in history. Or should I say "vipers". When WWII broke out, my father's German Immigrant family was perfectly safe (but then, FDR dealt with literal Pro-Nazi opposition before Pearl Harbor). And when my father volunteered for the Marines (to avoid being drafted to the Army), he was sent from his home in Maryland to California to be part of the Pacific Campaign, which he was relieved about, since he didn't want to kill any of HIS cousins on the battlefield. My father was a proud American Racist.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:51 PM on October 10, 2016 [3 favorites]


I have a very good friend, whose grandparents ran a well-established hotel in what was once Japantown. Once their family was interned, they lost all of their property and never regained it. The building is still there though.

Institutional racism literally makes it impossible for people of color to hold and maintain onto institutions and community spaces. It's so awful.
posted by yueliang at 3:04 PM on October 10, 2016 [8 favorites]


I've been to the site of the Topaz internment camp, near Delta, Utah. There aren't any structures left, but you can find buttons, broken china, and a lead pipe here and there. It isn't a place I would want to camp in, let alone live. The Japanese internment is a stain on American history.
posted by pashdown at 3:56 PM on October 10, 2016 [2 favorites]


Doesn't the book "Snow Falling on Cedars" have as an element of its post-WWII story a family in Washington who lost their strawberry farm when they are relocated? This event echoed for years.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:09 PM on October 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


Doesn't the book "Snow Falling on Cedars" have as an element of its post-WWII story a family in Washington who lost their strawberry farm when they are relocated? This event echoed for years.


Specifically Bainbridge Island shown in one of the photos.
posted by humboldt32 at 6:55 PM on October 10, 2016 [2 favorites]


If Earth were conquered by extraterrestrials, I wouldn't even be mad.

I would. I mean, the fact that they’re conquering other planets isn’t a good sign.
posted by Fongotskilernie at 7:06 PM on October 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


The internment camp in Minidoka County, Idaho, was one of the largest US camps. It's horrible dry, dusty, high desert country--lots of lava rock, sagebrush, and snakes, not much else. In 1942 the first detainees arrived to find no running water or sewer facilities. It is locally known as Hunt Camp. The living conditions were pretty grim even after facilities were built. Apparently internees from other camps were often transferred to Idaho. It was made a National Historical Site in 2001.
PDF 1 PDF 2
posted by BlueHorse at 9:10 PM on October 10, 2016 [5 favorites]


The perpetrator was punished with a lovely memorial on the Potomac.
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 11:23 PM on October 10, 2016


Hoover's commentary on the Internment is chilling: "The necessity for mass evacuation is based primarily upon public and political pressure rather than on factual data."

The internment camps are invariably hell holes of geography. I've been to Manzinar and it's an incredibly moving place to imagine trying to scratch out an existence. Those who brought beauty to those places are a testament of the stubbornness of the human spirit.

My neighbor down the street wrote of her time as an internee. Her story of that time, like too many, is Godawful, all the more so that it happened a short bike ride from here.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 11:48 PM on October 10, 2016 [4 favorites]


The most highly decorated infantry regiment in US military history consisted almost entirely of Nisei.

Every time I hear about how the Japanese-Americans couldn't be trusted I think of this group of men and the sacrifices they made.
posted by longbaugh at 1:06 AM on October 11, 2016 [10 favorites]


Even New Zealand was caught up in the internment frenzy. Although the "prisoners" were treated humanely, there were incidents that we can't forget. NZ was closer to the Asian war than the US, and we were visited by submarines.

Now, in many cities throughout NZ there are Japanese memorial gardens.
posted by arzakh at 4:56 AM on October 11, 2016 [2 favorites]


The most highly decorated infantry regiment in US military history consisted almost entirely of Nisei.

One of whom was PFC Sadao Munemori, the only Asian-American to receive the Medal of Honor in World War II (until an Army panel revisited records in the 1990s and found a bunch that should have been awarded but weren't because of racism). Here's his official citation on the U.S. Army's website. At the time of his death in combat, the rest of the Munemori family was in the Manzanar War Relocation Center.

Now scroll up one, to SGT Joseph Muller's citation, which describes how Sergeant Muller "charged the Japs". That's in his official citation. It will be there forever, just above Private Munemori's.
posted by Etrigan at 6:10 AM on October 11, 2016 [6 favorites]


Even New Zealand was caught up in the internment frenzy. Although the "prisoners" were treated humanely, there were incidents that we can't forget.

I think it's a mistake to conflate the tragedy at Featherston, which held prisoners of war from the Guadalcanal campaign, with the system of civilian internment. NZ's experience with Japanese civilian detainees might be considered a matter of small numbers and luck.

Japanese Wartime Internees in New Zealand: Fragmenting Pacific Island Families:

NZ refused the British request to help accommodate Axis country internees held in Britain, but did accept responsibility for the British Crown Colony of Fiji and the British Protectorate of Tonga.
By 1942, of about 183 male aliens interned on Somes (Matiu) Island in Wellington Harbour, 28 (later 31) Germans were from Western Samoa, 16 from Tonga and three from Fiji. Of the Japanese, 14 men were from Tonga and 31 from Fiji. In New Zealand itself, there were 11 Japanese and only a few were interned. Old men integrated into the community usually were exempted, but monitored. One such was Kazuyuki Kiyohei Tsukigawa, a naturalised New Zealander well respected in Balclatha, who was put under house arrest and observed by the police. One part-Japanese, part-Maori man, Martin Noda was detained for a few months as he had active family contacts in Japan.

Within the Pacific Island countries, the treatment of the families of the Japanese internees differed. Of the 31 men from Fiji, 11 had Fijian, Fiji-Indian, Samoan or Tongan de jure or de facto wives. These women stayed behind in Fiji when the men were shipped to New Zealand. In Tonga, most Japanese had been interned on 8 December or soon after on Makaha‘a Island. The Tongan government shipped the seven Japanese wives and their children to New Zealand but, like Fiji, allowed non-Japanese wives and children to remain. …In addition to internment of enemy aliens, the Island administrations seized all their property. In Tonga's case, the over-worked Custodian of Enemy Property did not do this expeditiously, and several military requisitions as well as losses and thefts occurred before this could be audited professionally, thus reducing the assets of the internees and their families.
Where things get bad is repatriation and return. Various governments (UK, NZ, AUS, etc) wanted to exchange their internees for some of the internees held by Axis powers. It had to take place through a neutral country (in this case, Portugal's colonies East Africa and Goa), so most of the men from Tonga and Fiji with Japanese families were transferred to Australia for transhipment. Nine of them died, and several injured, in a plane crash on the way to Australia. Those that got there were trapped:
…the Japanese wanted internees with strategic information and could not produce several whom Australia requested because they had executed them or otherwise could not account for them. Soon too, Japanese ships to move repatriates were no longer available, as the Americans increasingly picked off its naval and merchant shipping.
At the end of the war, the White Australia policy saw the internees in Australia largely deported back to Japan. NZ had five Japanese internees left on Somes Island. Two were naturalized British subjects, who returned to NZ. Three were from Tonga.
The British consul negotiated on behalf of these last Tongan Japanese, but eventually Tonga's Premier Ata announced that only Nakao would be allowed to return. Ata pointed out that Her Majesty, Queen Salote, in Council had decided:
the consent given to the return of Nakao was purely an act of mercy on account of his having a Tongan wife and children in Tonga, and also on account of his particularly good record whilst here previously. The policy of not allowing the Japanese to return to Tonga was confirmed, and the return of Nakao will in no way be regarded as a precedent.
Tonga was otherwise unrelenting. Kumazu Nishi died in Wellington hospital of tuberculosis soon after the war ended, with his ashes sent to his wife, Manusin of Tokomololo in Tonga. Although he had a family he cared for on Ha‘apai, the Tongan government declined Mitsuichi Saito re-entry so the New Zealand government, seeing no alternative, attached him to a group of former Japanese POWs returning to Japan.
The interned Germans, with the exception of blatant Nazis, were given the option to return to New Zealand.
posted by zamboni at 7:57 AM on October 11, 2016 [2 favorites]


It is noteworthy that the Internees in the US were locked up because they "looked" Japanese. Most were citizens who would've been recognized as American the moment they opened their mouth's any where in the world. There was no other evidence of disloyalty. It could happen to anyone. How about today's persecution of Muslim men and women because of their headgear?
posted by shnarg at 9:18 AM on October 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


I am reminded of my grandfathers, both English-speaking, American-born citizens of Japanese descent, spared the camps only by virtue of their Hawaiian residency at the time.

My father's father volunteered to serve his country after Pearl Harbor and went on to fight in the Pacific theater, working as a translator and enduring abuses from both sides. He became a decorated officer and was a proud military man for most of his life. A clean, quiet, and private person by nature, he never spoke of his time in the service, but he always had an American flag displayed somewhere around the house, and General MacArthur was one of his personal heroes. I never knew him well, but I greatly respected him, although I can scarcely imagine what it must have taken to enlist under the circumstances he did.

My mother's father was also a U.S. Army veteran, but he had been drafted, and he liked to tell the story of how he tried to pretend he didn't understand any Japanese, because he was so worried they would send him off to Japan, a land his parents had fled for fear of being used as cannon fodder by the Japanese government. He drifted from the military to work as a mechanic and later as a farmer. He was a man of simple tastes, who smoked like a chimney and dressed in near rags, but he worked hard and had an uncanny knack for caring about people and getting them to care about him in return. He was my hero as a kid, even though he spent some of his twilight years "playing the ponies" at the same race track where many of his friends were ripped from their homes to live in the stables as temporary housing.

The little girl holding a package in this photo looks so much like me at her age it hurts, but today, I am very privileged to live free from many of the stigmas and prejudices my grandfathers faced. They're both gone now, but they each thought the U.S. was the greatest country in the world, despite firsthand knowledge of how very flawed it could be. I like to think it is because they believed in its potential rather than the harsh realities they endured, and I am certain they would be ashamed and outraged at the rampant xenophobic remarks recently made by public figures that should know better. This was a deeply shameful period in history, and it is horrifying to even think that we are coming so close to repeating it.
posted by Diagonalize at 11:52 AM on October 11, 2016 [11 favorites]


I am reminded of my grandfathers, both English-speaking, American-born citizens of Japanese descent, spared the camps only by virtue of their Hawaiian residency at the time.

My father's father volunteered to serve his country after Pearl Harbor and went on to fight in the Pacific theater, working as a translator and enduring abuses from both sides.


My own grandfather on my mother's side had an extremely similar story, though AFAIK he didn't stay in the military very long after his mandatory term was up.

It's worth pointing out that there were internment camps even in Hawaii, like at Honouliuli and Sand Island. They were much smaller than the ones on the mainland, though, and the vast majority of Hawaii's Japanese residents were not interned. Wikipedia suggests this is because the Hawaiian Islands were operating under martial law already and therefore there was no need for mass interment to prevent espionage and sabotage, but I'm pretty sure the real difference was that the Japanese community in Hawaii was more simply integrated into the local society compared to the mainland. So it was easy to scapegoat mainland Japanese and send them off to the desert than to start rounding up everyone's neighbours and coworkers.
posted by tobascodagama at 1:28 PM on October 11, 2016


I suspect the pineapple and sugar cane plantations may have also played a big part in that decision. I believe that a significant majority of the Japanese community were out working in the fields and already living under near-poverty conditions in carefully-monitored company camps, so it was viewed as economically inefficient to move them from a lucrative industry-supported camp to a government sponsored one.
posted by Diagonalize at 2:03 PM on October 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


Considering that the territorial government literally started out as a hostile takeover of the islands by the Dole family, that would make a lot of sense.
posted by tobascodagama at 2:24 PM on October 11, 2016


Here's one story with a happy ending. The Furuichi family had a 5 acre nursery that a lawyer tried to get them to sell for $600 when they faced internment. Fortunately there were friendly neighbors who looked after the property, and they were able to return.

They are still there at the popular nursery, smack in the middle of one of the wealthiest communities in the SF Bay Area. The land itself is probably worth more than $20 million now.
posted by eye of newt at 12:41 AM on October 12, 2016 [4 favorites]


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